The European MARKOS project, coordinated by Fraunhofer FOKUS, is developing a prototype application for browsing and analysing functional, structural and licensing properties of open source software at the semantic level. 7 partners from 5 countries, including industries, universities, and research institutions are involved in the project.

MARKOS differs from other services available on the Web, which often provide only text-based code search, in that it pro- vides the possibility to browse a semantic model of the structure of source code at a high level of abstraction, in order to facilitate the querying and browsing of the structure and relationships of software components across projects and source code repositories. MARKOS provides an integrated view of the open source software at a global scale. Last, but not least, MARKOS is able to identify and understand potential license compatibility issues. The MARKOS license analyser uses a rule-base model of open source licenses and relevant copyright principles, together with argumentation technology, to help users to construct, evaluate, visualize and share arguments about license compatibility issues. Tools are provided for helping developers to search for alternative licenses and software solutions to overcome licensing issues.